CNN on 'Virginity Checks' Then and Now

CNN seems shocked, shocked! when “Egyptian general admits ‘virginity checks’ conducted on protesters:”

A senior Egyptian general admits that “virginity checks” were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.

The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.

At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or “virginity tests.”

But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

“The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” the general said. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).”

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn’t later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were (virgins).”

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But isn’t this more or less SOP amongst kleptocratic Middle East regimes? Back in 2002, the New York Times reported:

[Then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw] told the breakfast gathering that the aim of the disclosures was ”to remind the world that the abuses of the Iraqi regime extend far beyond its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in violation of its international obligations.”

A copy of a government personnel card in the report, credited to the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard, described a state employee, Aziz Salih Ahmed, as a ”fighter in the popular army.” The report said his assigned ”activity” was ”violation of women’s honor.”

And yet somehow, CNN had no problem cozying up to Saddam themselves.

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